At Falls Road Primary, our mission is to provide a positive and educational environment which facilitates, supports and extends all facets of student development.
We are an Independent Public School priding ourselves on working closely with parents and the community. We provide a high quality education that develops resilient, respectful and lifelong learners.
Our school focuses on developing the 'whole child' through exposure to academic, artistic, social and sporting experiences that provide all students with the opportunity to 'shine' and enable them to participate as informed active and responsible members of society.
Our caring, dedicated staff provide a robust curriculum, quality programs and extra-curricular activities for students, including lessons delivered by specialist teachers in art, music, Italian and physical education. Our music program includes a school choir and instrumental tuition for selected students. The school provides a safe and supportive learning environment for students and welcomes parent involvement in school-based programs.
In 2017 Falls Road Primary School was identified as one of the high gain schools across Australia (in the top 20 in WA) that achieved substantially above the expected gain from Year 3 to Year 5 in the 2016 National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results. Again in 2021, we were recognized by the Minister of Education and the Director General who cosigned a Certificate of Academic Excellence for our NAPLAN results. This is a reflection on the effectiveness of the programs, the strategies we have and also the quality of the teachers and support staff at Falls Road.
To continue maintaining these standards, we use a range of strategies including: our Whole School English and Maths Plans which ensure connectedness across the year levels; our targeted Intensive Reading Program for Year 3 to Year 6 students; and our small group support programs for students across the school.
We have a continued focus on Reading Comprehension skills. We have integrated Talk 4 Writing into the Junior years to underpin and support the '7 Steps to Writing Success' approach.
We will continue to build on and develop students' Science, Technology, English and Maths (STEM) skills through the use of a range of hands-on, engaging and relevant resources. With the support of the P&C we have built a dedicated STEM room which opened in 2019.
In ICT, students have access to a lab of computers as well as a mini-lab of laptops which are used for a variety of tasks. There are pods of iPads for class use and every classroom has an interactive whiteboard or touch panel. Digital technology skills will be enhanced through exposure to and use of a range of different coding resources including robots (Bee-bots, Spheros, Edison robots), on-line programs and investigations as well as a focus on developing student's digital keyboard skills.
Falls Road Primary Independent Public School has developed a fantastic team of teaching and non-teaching staff who are committed to achieving and maintaining our high standards of student achievement and identifying effective ways of adding value to programs already in place. We do this through a comprehensive yearly schedule of student assessment in Reading comprehension, Maths, Spelling and Writing and tracking of student achievement from Pre-Primary to Year 6.
This is underpinned by a detailed analysis of student data including our NAPLAN tests which are conducted with all students in Years 3, 4, 5 and 6 along with On-Entry testing for Pre Primary students.
We are committed to maintaining the current levels of resourcing and support to ensure students have the opportunity to continuously improve and develop across all curriculum areas.
To enhance our ability to know where our students are at and how we are doing, we contracted Elastik, (previously Best Performance) to provide us with the DataHUB data analysis program in 2019.
We have fine tuned this program with our range of assessments and it has enhanced our ability to monitor and analyse student progress, individually, in groups, in cohorts and as a school across curriculum areas. It has also assisted us to develop benchmarks which we are using to determine the degree of student progress.
This analysis identified a decrease in student achievement. Research identified that schools using the Explicit Teaching approach were achieving significantly higher results (ie in NAPLAN) This approach improves the transference of learning from short term memory and embeds it into long term memory.
We were successful in being selected in the first cohort of schools to participate in the program providing intensive professional learning through the Centre for Excellence in the Explicit Teaching of Literacy. The Centre was established in December 2018 by the Department of Education in partnership with Curtin University and five public primary schools. We have committed to a phased introduction of this approach throughout the school, commencing in 2020 with the goal of improving student learning and achievement across the board from K to Year 6.
Early intervention strategies are central to the philosophy of the school and are recognised as a cornerstone in developing and fostering life-long learning skills and habits. All Kindergarten students are screened for Oral Language in Term 1 each year. Areas of need are identified and a program of intervention is developed.
The Intervention program is delivered under the supervision of the Kindergarten teacher. The teacher also communicates with parents to coordinate any activities which can be duplicated at home.
The school is supported through a strong and active partnership with the Parents and Citizens Association and the School Board. Parents are regularly and positively engaged in a range of activities across the school.
Through the teaching and learning program, our school acknowledges that students learn at different rates and in different ways. We have built a reputation as a responsive and engaging school where parents are seen as partners in the educational process and we work proactively to ensure this is maintained. This has been recognised and acknowledged in all previous IPS External Reviews of the school in 2013, 2016 and 2021.
We have a range of proactive strategies in place to ensure regular attendance across all year levels and our attendance is consistently higher than the State average.
Our school motto is 'Challenge the Present - Create the Future' and we will continue to do this through a range of innovative and engaging programs and a committed group of teaching and non-teaching personnel.
We welcome you to visit our website fallsroadps.wa.edu.au or contact us to discover more about what our wonderful school can offer your child.
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